


Nothing Is Better

by elle_nic



Category: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, based on another tumblr post wow elle so original
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 07:16:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21388234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_nic/pseuds/elle_nic
Summary: Miranda has a dream.
Relationships: Miranda Priestly/Andrea Sachs
Comments: 7
Kudos: 151





	Nothing Is Better

Miranda has been sleeping well lately, by general consensus. She has been reaching REM sleep each night and sleeping for around six hours, waking feeling rested. But with her deep, restful sleep comes strange dreams. Ones that, thankfully, she forgets all about by the morning. But on days like today, she is not so lucky. As soon as her eyes open to the dim light of dawn, she breaths in deep and sees flashes of dark hair and tears on her cheeks that are not hers, fallen certainly from honeyed eyes.

It is the strangest and most vivid dream, Miranda recalls, as she tries to apply her eyeliner. She was somewhere dark, a forest perhaps, but like no forest she had ever seen. There was a single glade of black grass amongst black tree trunks and black leaves and a black sky. And in the centre of the lonely patch of earth was Andréa, curled around herself on her knees in pure white, sobbing, wailing an echo through the miserable place. She looked up and into Miranda’s eyes, _please don’t break my heart_ she begged, over and over. _Please, Miranda, not my heart! Not you!_

Miranda wakes up breathless.

She moves about her bedroom trying to shake off the horrible dream, one of the only she can remember. As she dons a tight skirt and a daring blouse, as she accessorises and selects heels, she tries ardently to forget the image of her now tentative friend weeping so heavily in the glen of her dreams. It is no a question of what the dream meant, Miranda acknowledges as she steps into the car for work, but rather what she will do with the obvious meaning.

Her and Andréa had struck a shaky friendship since the younger woman’s departure after serving her two years as assistant. They had met with Nigel for two meals and had exchanged emails, bussed cheeks at events they were both invited to… But Miranda has known that Andréa feels more for her and has known that she too has felt the same from a time when such emotions were inappropriate to have. But she is cowardly, she knows, and she doesn’t want to risk rejection. Rejection that she knows she deserves, should Andréa do just that. So, she keeps quiet about her feelings, but still invites Andréa’s with some cruel intention to disallow the young reporter to find love elsewhere. As she says: a coward.

But her dream, she refocusses, leaving the elevator in the 17th floor and waving the newest assistant away, is telling her something she already knows. She is breaking Andréa’s heart by not claiming it for herself, and poor, beautiful Andréa does not deserve that. She deserves a love so unreserved, so all-encompassing that it leaves her breathless with wonder, and Miranda fears above all else that she may not be able to give Andréa this. So instead, her lovesick brain supplies, she will deny them both the possibility.

By the time Irv storms her office at one that afternoon (“like ill-dressed clockwork”), she manages to think of every single negative outcome that a relationship with Andréa would bring upon them. As Irv berates her for her budget, she considers that her children would be disgusted with her for wanting to be with someone closer to their age than her own. As her boss leaves with some flat-falling threat, she dismisses the idea that her daughters would be against the relationship, on account of the fact that they adore Andréa and have several friends with same sex parents (Miranda is also reasonably sure that Caroline has a girlfriend she isn’t ready to bring up). So, she dismisses that a same sex relationship would pose any issue.

As Nigel swans into her office with complaints to do with a spread, Miranda begins to consider the positive outcomes. Her brain only gets as far as _love love love_ before she waves Nigel away and collects her things to leave. Her assistants, both of whom contain their surprise enough at her early departure, were told to rearrange her schedule enough for a dinner from six to eight on the coming Thursday with nary but a backward glance from Miranda.

_Please don’t break my heart_, that eerie, troubled voice says, the echo ricocheting against her skull. _Please_, the voice repeats as she dials a seldom rung number on her phone.

“Sachs,” Andréa says in lieu of answer. _Not my heart!_

“Andréa.”

“Miranda! How are you?”

“Well,” she lies. “I hope I can say the same after this call,” she adds, feeling her heart thunder in her chest.

“Oh? Is there bad news?”

“Not at all… Will you have dinner with me this Thursday?”

“… Just the two of us?”

“Yes, Andréa.” _Not you, Miranda! Don’t break my heart!_

“Oh, Miranda, I’d love to,” comes a soft, honest reply.

She knows, on a reasonable level, that she had made the right choice in this, that she has no reason to be worried about anything. But in the days that lead up to Thursday, Miranda finds herself chewing her fingernails or checking the time every few minutes or twisting her fingers. She worries herself dizzy until the moment Andréa arrives to their date, and even after they buss cheeks as is their custom. She will convince herself later that night to invite Andréa to another dinner, and then she’ll worry all through that one, too.

She will worry when they kiss the first time, the pained cry of her dream apparition begging her not to break her heart. She will smile after each kiss and move in for another, trying to tell herself that she isn’t going to break any hearts, that she will save Andréa that pain. She will worry when Andréa tells her that she loves her the first time. Miranda will hear her heart beating in a panicked tempo, to the tune of _Please don’t break my heart!_ even as she says, “I love you, too.”

The night Miranda proposes to Andréa, she dreams again of pained begging, of tortured cries asking her for mercy. She wakes breathless next to Andréa and cries quietly. She feels her heart empty, wishes that she never dreamed, wishes that she could wake up in the metaphorical sense. She falls back to sleep and doesn’t dream again. Miranda is worried when she wakes up in the morning, worried that maybe she’s making a mistake somehow. She doesn’t think about it more and instead moves to apply her eyeliner.

“I just need you to be honest,” Andréa says two months to the day before their wedding. Miranda looks and looks and looks and sees the same face peering up at her covered in tears and surrounded by black.

“Of course, darling,” she chokes out.

“Do you really want to be married?”

She says she has nothing against marriage, and Andréa asks her if it’s _who_ she’s marrying that gives her pause. Miranda does not answer. She only worries and hopes not to break any hearts. It’s a wasted effort.

Wasted, because Andréa sits before her, on the barstool in the kitchen of their home, and cries. Miranda cannot move, her anxiety has planted her feet and she can only watch, can only look upon her fiancée as the same tearstained face as her dream looks at her, looks right through her. Her breath leaves her, she chokes up and cradles her own neck, coaxing breath into it.

“Do you love me?”

All the breath leaves her, because she cannot answer. She cannot if she wishes to save Andréa’s heart. A heart that she fears she may have broken anyway.

“Yes,” she manages to whisper, and finds with no small amount of relief that it's true. “Yes, Andréa, of course I do.”

“Are you sure? I,” she breathes once, deeply, and turns her face up to Miranda like a flower to the sun. “I need you to be _sure_.”

“I will not break your heart, Andréa,” Miranda says with all the conviction in the world. “I won’t!”

She reminds Andréa of this every day before their wedding. She reminds her on their wedding day and then their wedding night as she makes love to her wife. She reminds her every weekend, every stolen kiss, every time she comes home to a heartfelt _You’re home!_ Every time she reminds Andréa, Miranda reminds herself, too. Because she remembers that dream, and she remembers what life was like before she took a dive into the unknown. She compares it to her present, which is Andréa laying her head on her lap and humming as Miranda’s fingers stroke her scalp. Nothing is better than this, she knows. Nothing is better.

“Do you love me?” Andréa asks her quietly, eyes closed as Miranda massages her temples. She smiles and feels her wrinkles crease, feels tenderness enter her eyes.

“I do, darling,” she whispers. “I won’t break your heart,” she adds as she does every time Andréa asks her this question.

“Thank you,” is the sighed reply. _No, thank _you, Miranda thinks.

_Don’t break my heart,_ the dream echoes still, and to the voice which quietens as every wedding anniversary passes, Miranda answers even surer than the last time.

_I won’t._


End file.
